Appeal No. 2002-2086
Application 09/010,396
The examiner refers to appellants' specification which
states that "loji is length of the overlapping wire that connects
driver and sinks j and i" (spec. at 8) and states that
"[a]ppellants do not provide or attach any particular meaning to
the term 'overlapping wire' which would ordinarily mean one wire
crossing another" (EA9). The "[e]xaminer asserts that a segment
that crosses a cut line is an overlapping segment and further
asserts that an algorithm that is attempting to minimize the
weight of all net segments crossing the cut line must necessarily
include a term that accounts for the net segment" (EA10).
Appellants argue that nothing in Li indicates that Li's
min-cut algorithm automatically accounts for overlapping wires or
even that Li's min-cut algorithm is used in the calculation of an
interconnect delay between a driver and a sink (EA10).
It appears that the examiner is relying on the term
"overlapping wire" being undefined and therefore being so broad
that it is met by anything. If a term is considered indefinite,
the claims should be rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 112, second
paragraph. In this case, while it would have been desirable to
have a definition in the specification, we consider that
"overlapping wire" has a known meaning in the interconnect delay
and refers to the portion of the unique path between the input
and node "i" that is common with the unique path between the
input and node "k". See R. Gupta and L.T. Pileggi, The Elmore
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